Political Geography最新文献

The computational logics of large language models (LLMs) or generative AI – from the early models of CLIP and BERT to the explosion of text and image generation via ChatGPT and DALL-E − are increasingly penetrating the social and political world. Not merely in the direct sense that generative AI models are being deployed to govern difficult problems, whether decisions on the battlefield or responses to pandemic, but also because generative AI is shaping and delimiting the political parameters of what can be known and actioned in the world. Contra the promise of a generalizable “world model” in computer science, the article addresses how and why generative AI gives rise to a model of the world, and with it a set of political logics and governing rationalities that have profound and enduring effects on how we live today. The article traces the genealogies of generative AI models, how they have come into being, and why some concepts and techniques that animate these models become durable forms of knowledge that actively shape the world, even long after a specific material commercial GPT model has moved on to a new iteration. Though generative AI retains significant traces of former scientific and computational regimes – in statistical practices, probabilistic knowledge, and so on – it is also dislocating epistemological arrangements and opening them to novel ways of perceiving, characterising, classifying, and knowing the world. Four defining aspects of the political logic of generative AI are elaborated: i) generativity as something more than the capacity to generate image or text outputs, so that a generative logic acts upon the world understood as estimates of “underlying distributions” in data; ii) latency as a political logic of compression in which (by contrast with claims to reduction or distortion) the thing that is hidden, unknown or latent becomes surfaced and amenable to being governed; iii) broken and parallelized sequences as the ordering device of the political logic of generative AI, where attention frameworks radically change the possibilities for governing non-linear problems; iv) pre-training and fine-tuning as a computational logic of generative AI that simultaneously shapes a “zero shot politics” oriented towards unencountered data and new tasks. Across each of the four aspects, the article maps the emerging contemporary political logic of generative AI.

The recent increase in Venezuelan migrants and refugees to Brazil has prompted a humanitarian response coordinated by multiple government agencies and inter/national organisations. This coordination effort sits under the umbrella of the Operation Welcome task force, in which the military is heavily involved. Situated in the northern state of Roraima, bordering Venezuela, this article explores one particular site of humanitarian care: a set of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) facilities located in the capital city of Boa Vista. Here, I investigate the militaristic design and processes of the shower block, which is available to Venezuelan refugees and migrants who are living without adequate shelter. In doing so, this paper argues that the normalisation of militarism in humanitarian intervention (re)produces exclusion and precarity for those accessing spaces of care. By understanding the water infrastructure of the site as an infrastructure of containment, this research shines light on the everyday, often invisiblised implications of migration governance that occur at the micro-scale. In particular, it highlights the conditions of slow and symbolic violence that are embedded within the military-humanitarian response.

This article documents the struggle of pro-choice nongovernmental organizations, Women on Web, Women on Waves, and Aid Access, to provide reproductive healthcare information and procedures, including medical abortion, to people around the world seeking to exercise their human rights to physical health and autonomy irrespective of state legal structures. These organizations seek to affirm and share factual reproductive health knowledge and care approved by the World Health Organization including safe and approved medical abortions. Women on Waves and Women on Web use international waters and the Internet as common spaces to exercise freedom over bodily autonomy. Specifically, Women on Web and Aid Access use the Internet as a digital imaginary extension of physical international spaces. The authors argue that a transparent and open Internet, as an imagined common, is essential to countering ongoing processes of privatization of international spaces and restrictions on reproductive health rights. Under this framework, the status of abortion care websites to remain accessible and avoid censorship is a bellwether for both net neutrality and feminist geopolitics. The struggle for an open Internet has broad implications for reproductive health, bodily autonomy, and the free exchange of ideas.

Recent studies have applied the explanatory framework of state rescaling to interrogate China's emergent city-regional governance. Much of the extant literature has concentrated on either the centrally driven city regionalism from above or local efforts on cross-boundary cooperation from below. Rather than simply abstracting the multi-dimensional and multi-scalar dynamics in the rescaling process around one singular state project, this paper moves forward to explore the co-existence and co-functioning of variegated rescaling processes contributing to regional governance by deploying assemblage as a heuristic approach. This paper examines an inter-jurisdictional development zone – Beijing-Tianjin Zhongguancun Tech Town in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region to provide a relational and processual understanding of scalar politics on the ground. Our analysis demonstrates how discrete and fragmented spaces and actors are assembled within a specific entity through various rescaling processes. The interplay of local, regional and national actors with different motivations gives rise to a new inter-scalar and inter-jurisdictional regulatory regime for regional industrial integration with relative coherence. This emergent governance regime is sustained and embedded in both topological and territorial political relations. This article furthers the understanding of China's city regional governance by analysing a situated assemblage. It provides an applicable perspective for investigating other trans-local projects and city regionalism.

Place-based identities could potentially shape how the public evaluates political information, especially when cleavages between rural and non-rural become more central to politics. Rural voters may particularly respond distinctly to knowledge about the United States political system, which through several political institutions, notably the federal Senate, gives rural areas a share of votes exceeding their share of the population. Observational survey responses from the 2020 American National Election Study show that although most respondents feel that government institutions give less political influence to rural areas, knowledge about American politics reduces that feeling. The relationship between this knowledge and beliefs about rural political influence, however, occurs only in those with suburban and, especially, urban identities; rural and small-town identifiers seemingly shrug off their knowledge in assessing rural political influence.

Illinois passed the Energy Transition Act (i.e., the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act or CEJA) in 2021, which established clean energy mandates with an emphasis on social equity. We examine CEJA and related policies to understand the politics of Illinois' energy transition. While CEJA has been praised as an approach to a just transition, critics argue that it exacerbated Illinois' rural-urban dichotomy by distributing benefits to urban areas defined as ‘environmental justice communities’ and tangible costs, in the form of clean energy infrastructure, to rural communities. We demonstrate that, leading up to and in response, 1) local governments deployed measures to oppose renewable energy development and 2) the state, in turn, scaled authority for energy governance upward to inhibit opposition. By framing reduced participation as necessary for just climate action, Illinois undermined procedural forms of justice viewed as critical to a just transition and reinforced energy as a partisan political issue. This case illustrates how a narrow definition of justice can contribute to distributive conflict in the energy transition and identifies a need for more inclusive strategies to manage such conflict.

This paper provides a critical, interdisciplinary analysis of the current global landscape of climate action and response with the aim of determining its overall trajectory toward either justice and equity on the one hand, or exploitation and segregation on the other. It finds that tendencies toward the latter are far more pronounced. This paper summarizes those findings and presents arguments for three categories of climate action that are producing and/or exacerbating inequity, injustice, and segregation. They are: securitization (of resources, infrastructure, borders, and land), financialization (of exploitative mitigation and adaptation measures), and (im)mobilization (of migrants and the climate-vulnerable alongside the increased mobility of elite populations). An examination of the political rhetoric and public discourse associated with these trends follows, revealing widespread dehumanization and ‘othering’ used to condone a system that justifies protection for some populations and the expendability of others. Together, this analysis provides a framework for exposing and critiquing our current trajectory toward an outcome that is best described as climate apartheid.

The special issue Abject Lives brings together five articles that attend to questioning the processes that render nonhumans as “abject others” (Kristeva, 1982), devoid of value and amenable to elimination and killing. By doing so, it centres animals and other nonhumans that rarely become subject to positive valuations or human sympathy, such as slurry, wolves, geese and other species that are classified as ‘invasive’ or as a ‘health threat’. Drawing on empirical case studies from Australia and Germany, each of the articles demonstrates how processes of abjection intersect with practices of state-making, governing and power; practices that extend towards nonhumans and that often work towards their violent erasure. In the introduction to the special issue, we review how the articles build from and contribute to a growing interest in more-than-human approaches within the subdiscipline of political geography.